OT: Poll - which antivirus software?

[John Rumm]

That article would appear to be over two years old now[1], so at best its going to be misleading.

[1] According to the wayback archive it was last updated in Dec 2007.

[Alan]

Whoosh...

Exactly the point I was making. There are ongoing security issues with the operating system that require you to update on a regular basis.

When companies buy in products they modify them to suit their own marketing aims. Microsoft tend to put hooks into the OS that are then exploited by virus writers.

I personally wouldn't install anything from Symantec but their tools are probably safer than anything MS produces for PC security.

My dislike of Symantec goes back a long way when they purchased Atguard (a great little firewall program) and turned it into some monster 'Norton' application. Instead of protecting a machine it took it over in much the same way as a virus.

[Adrian]

Adrian C gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Really? Do you have any reference for that?

[Adrian]

Bill gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Which is the price for the network edition for SBS, covering five clients plus the SBS server.

And worth every penny...

[Adrian]

Adrian C gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

I suspect the sarcasm may have gone flying straight past you...

[Adrian C]

Ah yes, The second sentence in the paragraph below was erroneously read in isolation after me coming back from an advance paddies night gurgling celebration.

Any recommendations for filler to repair this desk top my head has dented? Already on Aspirin for the head ....

[Dave Liquorice]

I was on AVG Free until they bought in the "websafe" feature that downloaded all the pages form a search result to check 'em and put up a silly little icon *just in case* you actually clicked on one. That single feature added 500MB to my monthly download, very significant when you average only 1GB...

Yes you could jump through hoops to switch it off but then you had warnings that you might not be fully protected etc.

Yep, and it is very much faster than AVG Free. Very annoying delay when opening files with AVG installed, ahardly noticeable with Avast. This is on, by modern standards, low powered machines (1GHz single core Athlon) under Win 2K.

[Adrian C]

OK, same _kind_ of boat.

Do you have any reference for that?

Privacy policies of either (if I can be asked to patiently examine both clause by clause) for I'm sure both OpenDNS and Phorm privacy policies look very similar, as the method of information collection _is_ very similar. Could one service swear they were in a less privacy compromising position than the other?

The sane solution is not to use _either_, or accept it _and_ use both - though every time the interweb breaks for subscribers of a particular ISP, the recomendative call runs round in forums for folks to change over to using OpenDNS settings. These are generally the same folks up in arms about the nasties of Phorm.

It's worth to note that ye ISP always has a list of addresses ye visit whether using their DNS service or not. My issue is about folks also supplying that personal list blindly and getting back something of very little benefit other than name-to-IP resolution.

[Howard Neil]

If I am thinking of the same "feature", turn if off from the add-on it puts in the browser. That way you don't get that massive exclamation mark over the AVG system tray icon.

[Adrian C]

The 'Link Scanner' component can be got rid of completely during installation by choosing the 'custom' options while doing so. Doing an uninstall and reinstall doesn't take too long.

In the early days of AVG 8.0 they had an opt out option that needed installation of the product from a command line prompt. Now it's just a little checkbox - no longer hoops!

As it's gone from the status overview interface, I don't get nasty warnings about it's non use.

[Jules]

Given the way that Windows spreads and has a habit of losing peoples' data, it's almost a virus by definition ;)

Yes, moving to a different OS does to a certain extent just buy time - although the competition is by and large better thought out security-wise and typically comes with a better set of defaults.

[Rod]

Glad you posted that - almost exactly my experience.

[Colin Wilson]

Avira has a detection rate equivalent to Kaspersky, going by the independant tests done by av-comparatives.org

I use it on my wifes' machine, but it's a little *too* good at detecting keygens as potentially malicious to be of much use on my machine ;-)

I use Avast.

[Colin Wilson]

I fix PCs for people on a regular basis, and as long as your "other"* security is up to date, Avast works great.

• not using IE, SpywareBlaster locking down activex exploits, hosts file tweaked, and a monthly scan with something like Spybot S&D

To put this into context, although I haven't seen much of AVG for the last 18 months, every machine I was called in to fix that had AVG installed had at least two active viruses in memory (actually running, not just on the hard drive).

I've got links to a few things spyware utils etc. on my site:

[T i m]

I think yours is the first mention of the HOSTS file I've seen.

What do you think of this one?

like your site btw. Nice to see to someone putting some realistic / practical advice up for non technical folk.

Probably, like you, most machines I get called to have simply been left unprotected AND abused for some time and I'm often surprised they even run at all. Simply installing, updating and running a little suite of the things you (we) suggest not only protects the machine from most stuff but often repairs it as well.

I wonder if the same people ignore the brake warning light on their car?

Cheers, T i m

[Mark]

I use AVG now but I used to use Avira. Its (Avira's) annoying nag screens put me off and it used to occasionally flag up false positives with unknown virus names.

[Mark]

It's ironic since AVG-free use "root-kit" technology in their virus scanner.

You can get other programs to scan for root kits such as the sysinternals one.

I wouldn't recommend anyone to use a USB modem since you can get a combined router/modem/switch/firewall for next to nothing nowadays. I just bought a BT hub for 99p!

[Adrian]

Mark gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

I've had some problems with Avira update servers being difficult to contact.

[Mark]

Agreed.

There have been some well publicised exploits of IE that were not fixed very quickly IIRC.

And many badly written applications for Windoze only work if you have admin privileges (i.e. games).

I wouldn't rely of software firewalls at all. They can be easily disabled by malware.

[Colin Wilson]

That's the problem with having no centralised global database of virus names - every vendor has their own take on what to call them :-}

The false positives from Avira in my experience is generally on stuff you actually *should* keep an eye on - although keygens are commonly "caught" when they're - as far as possible without decompiling - benign.

Just because Avira finds something that nothing else does, doesn't mean it's a false positive - it's just that some of the vendors can take over 6 months (in one instance i've seen personally) to actually add it to their own signatures.